Gamers who love a good challenge are bound to be satisfied with this collection of levels. Anyone else - whether they're as casual as it comes or even longtime fans of the series - may not be so enamoured with the spike in difficulty and lack of originality.

And that’s where New Leaf really sinks its fuzzy claws into you: it offers the constant carrot of a bigger house, a new town project, a fresh gameplay mechanic or simply a cooler collectible that you didn’t even know existed before that day.

State of Decay is so much more than the sum of its parts: it’s a fun, challenging game of survival that will demand more of you than just twitch reflexes. It’s another feather in the Xbox Live Arcade’s cap, and an essential purchase for gamers looking for a fresh take on a familiar theme.

Despite the occasional jarring juxtaposition between its story and its gameplay, The Last of Us is a landmark piece of interactive entertainment, proving that even action games can tell mature, thoughtful tales, with characters who don’t feel like an assortment of tropes and clichés.

Let’s call it a game of great breadth, if not depth.

Then I scanned the mental checklist of requirements for a 5 out of 5 score: high quality game without serious flaw? Check. One of the very best games available for the 3DS? Check. Does it use 3D to the game’s benefit? In general yes and at times, hell yes. Can a player turn off the 3D and still get a complete experience? Yup. Do I stay awake too late, miss busses, and burn food in the toaster oven because I’m so absorbed by it, and can’t put it down? Yes, yes and yes.

Possibly the best thing about Gunslinger, though, is how little it costs. At just $15, it’s one of the best bang-for-the-buck games I’ve seen so far this year, and has a slickness and confidence that belies its budget price.

For its art style, deceptively dark vibe and experimental approach, Don’t Starve is certainly worth a look. But for every playthrough that leads to eye-opening adventure, there will be another that’s a bit of a tedious slog. It won’t leave you hungry, but it may not fill you up.

The Chase Begins might have too many imperfections to be the standout masterwork its console big brother was, and given the choice, you should play that one rather than this one. But it’s still worth picking up and playing, especially if you love Lego, have younger children who need something to keep them busy in the car, or generally lean towards cute rather than blood-soaked.

It’s rare to see a compelling hack-and-slash dungeon crawler work as well as Pandora’s Tower, but this game needs to wear its accomplishments proudly. You very well may never go back to your Wii after this transition between console generations.

It’s bizarre and funny and quite unlike anything that’s been done before by a major video game studio. And for the most part, it works.

But aside from the solid and deep fighting game mechanics, my biggest kick came simply from taking control of these familiar heroes and villains and seeing how their unique and iconic abilities had been translated into game form.

As with food, video games are all about the freshness of the ingredients and the care taken in preparation and presentation. And when everything is just right, the result can be something like Guacamelee!

Don’t be deceived by the simplistic 2D presentation – Terraria is one of the deepest games currently available on PSN or Xbox Live Arcade.

The Army of Two games have always been overshadowed by Call of Duty and Gears of War and the other shooter juggernauts, but they had unique co-op gameplay elements and a goofy charm that set them apart. Both of these things are mostly missing in The Devil’s Cartel, and that’s a damn shame.

Luigi may be a little bit clumsy, and sucking up a ghost with a glorified vacuum may not be quite as satisfying as unloading a clip of bullets into an expletive-screaming terrorist, but the newest adventure starring Nintendo’s second-most-popular brother is still a heck of a lot of fun. It’s even head-and-shoulders above Mario’s latest handheld title, New Super Mario Bros. 2.

It’s the kind of game you’ll immediately want to replay again from the beginning, not just to experiment with new vigors and weapons and tactics, or to find the backstory-expanding Voxophones and Kinetoscopes you missed on the first run-through, but to see the little bits of foreshadowing, the subtle design choices, the dropped hints that build up to the game’s brain-bending denouement.

The eighth instalment of The Show series pulls no squeeze plays on quality and realism when it comes to the game of baseball.

For all its larger than life swagger and cartoonish bravado, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see Gears of War take a less-is-more approach with this game. Size certainly matters, but what you do with what you’ve got counts even more.

Lego City Undercover nails the best aspects of open world games in its own way, and with the inclusion of Lego building mechanics, it feels enough like its own thing rather than a sanitized version of an existing thing.

Unlike the previous downloadable content, though, Citadel seems designed very much as a send-off for the Mass Effect crew, a final chapter that shoots mainly for the heart with some collateral damage to the funnybone.

It’s not that the Spartan warrior’s step has lost its spring – it’s as lively and bloody as ever. The exhaustion comes from familiarity, that bitter breeder of contempt. Aside from a few rough patches, Ascension is a reasonably competent God of War game. But it’s undermined by an unshakable sense of déjà vu.

The technology works consistently well, assuming you’re sitting on the floor in a reasonably well-lit room. But just as importantly, Book of Spells has clearly been crafted with the Potter fan in mind, featuring incantations, settings and characters taken straight from the books.

Ultimately, Hitman: Absolution marks a faithful, gorgeous and only occasionally maddening return for a series that’s been gone far too long. It may have trouble finding fans among twitchy gamers with short attention spans, but guns and brains should never be mutually exclusive. And those kids can get off my damn lawn.

By virtue of how it stokes more parts of my brain than any game of the past decade, I’m inclined to consider XCOM: Enemy Unknown one of the most important titles of this generation. This game will test your disaster-management skills, levy you with suffocatingly difficult choices on how to spend your resources and cause you to grow so fond of your chess pieces that each skirmish takes on the flavour of a Whedonesque drama.

Almost everything about Far Cry 3 speaks to the game’s skilled, confident and tightly interwoven design, and players are free to seek their specific flavour of gratification and victory as Jason becomes the most dangerous animal on the island.

The Assassin’s Creed formula of fighting and parkour is starting to get old, even with the ability to climb trees now. Maybe it’s the repetitiveness of the series, or maybe it’s just less interesting to toss crates of tea into the harbour than to hunt and kill corrupt bishops.

It adds that element of strategizing, especially in online play, where a player can knock out all three of their opponents in fell swoop. Plus, much to my amazement, a character I had no experience using won me my first online match – thank you, Jak.

In addition to the excellent musical score from Jackson’s trilogy playing while you smash stone as Gimli or conjure blocks as Gandalf, LEGO LOTR is the first of the LEGO games to use the voices and acting from the films.

The variety of enemies is ludicrously thin, and their attack strategy usually consists of standing in place and waiting for you to charge up and clobber them with a couple of swipes.

Still, for every demon slain, more beauty is restored to the land, as gorgeously rendered-flowers and wildlife spring up from the scenes of battle. And the wildlife that roams Nippon not to be feared, but rather fed, in sickeningly cute cutscenes.

Beyond the near-perfect controls and satisfying combat, Ninja Theory has clearly sweated the game's atmosphere and visuals.

If you're a fan of battling bots, Hawken is definitely worth checking out, and you should certainly have some free, fleeting fun with it right off the bat. But as the game lumbers towards an official release, I really hope they dial down the mechanized money magnets.

Seduce Me might be a way to ease us into the notion that sex in games isn’t necessarily harmful. But next time, it wouldn’t hurt if it was a little more fun, too.

Is it so weird that I’d rather pay $5 up front for a game based on fun, addictive core design principles than a “freemium” game that ends up feeling like an interactive advertisement for bundles of coins or gems or Smurfberries or whatever the currency of the moment is?

Yet it’s Little Inferno’s weird, dark, off-kilter tone that makes it so refreshing and intriguing. You’ll come for the pyromania puzzles, but you’ll want to see what happens when the smoke finally clears.

Wrath of the White Witch combines the innocence of an anime feature film with a well-known “get up and try again” attitude. The game is light-handed with its morals, and not overly melodramatic in its story. It exists as a perfect balance between two drastically different forms of storytelling: a film and role-playing game.

The characters, for instance, are equal parts annoying and forgettable, and the writing is genuinely laughable.

As an experimental bit of game design full of intriguing puzzles that defy earthly geometry, Antichamber is a success. Yet given a choice, I’d much rather spend my time with a more conventional first-person puzzler like Portal 2, Quantum Conundrum or Q.U.B.E. Maybe Antichamber is a little too clever for its own good. Or maybe I’m just dumb.

Rising is a great game that needed more time and effort to achieve perfection.

Clear Vision 2 almost feels unfinished. The large city map and hugely expanded stock of rifles available suggest you’re in for a much longer experience this time around, but it all ends with a weirdly shoehorned-in first-person shootout, after which the plot is tied up and credits roll.

It’s a fine return to form for the heroine whose comically conical boobs once fuelled a thousand adolescent quests for mythical nude codes. Lara Croft’s a real girl now, with real motivations, fears and feelings. And this is one reboot we hope will stick.